Saturday, June 03, 2006

The Stanley Cup Finals will start on Monday night. Until then, everyone will have a chance to analyze, prognosticate and make stuff up about this series. Most painfully, we will have to wait. For the city of Edmonton, they will have time to replenish their beer supplies after their highly publicized beer outages.

A lot of sites, professional and otherwise, break down their previews positionally. I won't get into depth on these, because I have a different point here. Most are in agreement that Carolina's forwards are slightly better than Edmonton's. All are in agreement that Edmonton's defense (so long as Chris(t) Pronger remains healthy) is better than Carolina's. Most say that Edmonton has better goaltending. Most say that Carolina's special teams are better. The coaches are about even.

The category that still remains is the mystical "intangible" category. I'm going to actually give the edge to the Oilers on this one. Because of spelling. In the recently concluded 2006 Scripps National Spelling Bee, Finola Hackett, a 14-year old girl from Toefield, Alberta (near Edmonton) took second place. Before anyone cracks wise, she DID NOT get booted on the word "center" (centre) or "color" (colour). After 19 rounds, including a seven round knockout bout with eventual champ Katherine Close, Finola misspelled the word 'weltschmerz'

The winner of the bee is from New Jersey. Who cares?

The second place finisher is an Albertan. The significance of that? The third place finisher is a North Carolinian. 14-year old Saryn Hooks from Taylorsville, North Carolina (which isn't really anywhere near Raleigh at all) was the last speller to be eliminated in the sudden death rounds. She misspelled icteritious.

It was Hooks' third trip to the national bee. In 2005, she finished in seventh place. It was Hackett's second time, after finishing 11th in 2005.

So Albertan 14-year old girls are slightly better at spelling than 14-year old North Carolina girls. And in four or five years, they'll be better at taking their shirts off in public, too.

Even though theirs (the new one, anyway) was designed by a highly successful comic book artist, and ours by a marketing guy in a basement somewhere, the "Sightless Eye" skates circles around any Oilers logo, ever (and around every single NHL logo introduced in the last 20 years). So, in the battle of the iconography, 'Canes win in four.

In real life, btw, 'Canes win in five (so we can see 'em skate with the cup in our own building).

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